The Black Hills are a small, isolated mountain range rising from the Great Plains of North America in western South Dakota and extending into Wyoming. Set off from the main body of the Rocky Mountains, the region is something of a geological anomaly—accurately described as an "island of trees in a sea of grass." The Black Hills encompass the Black Hills National Forest and are home to the tallest peaks of continental North America east of the Rockies.

Native Americans have a long (but scantily documented) human history in the Black Hills. When gold was discovered in 1874, a gold rush swept the area prompting the US government to re-assign the local Native Americans to other reservations in western South Dakota. Unlike the rest of the Dakotas, the Black Hills were settled primarily from population centers to the west and south of the region, as miners flocked there from earlier gold boom locations in Colorado and Montana.